SPORTNOW Cable Crossover Power Cage Review: Rack and Pulleys in One

Most home gym buyers hit the same fork in the road: a power cage for squats and presses, or a cable machine for pulldowns, flyes and rows. SPORTNOW's answer is to build both into one frame and sell it for around £340, which sounds too good until you read the words "plate loaded" and do the arithmetic on what a set of plates costs.

It is still an interesting machine, and for the right room it is a lot of gym for the money. The catch is that the sticker price is not the price.

What you actually get

The frame is a full cage, 220cm tall with a footprint of roughly 168cm by 165cm, made from powder-coated steel tubing and rated to 300kg overall. Inside and around it you get a pull-up bar with several grip positions, a plate-loaded dual pulley setup covering high and low positions, a lat pulldown, a pec fly station, a leg press bar, a barbell rack with two J-hooks, and a 360 degree landmine.

The accessory bundle is where SPORTNOW has clearly decided to compete. Two resistance bands, a triceps rope, a chain, a T-bar row handle and a footboard are all in the box. Buy those separately for a bare rack and you are eighty pounds down before you start, so their inclusion is a real part of the value here rather than marketing filler.

Plate loaded versus a weight stack

This is the decision that should drive your buying, so be clear about the trade.

A weight stack, like the one on the GYM MASTER cable crossover, lets you change resistance by moving a pin. Two seconds, no lifting, and drop sets are effortless. That convenience is why commercial gyms use stacks, and it is worth real money.

Plate loading gives you two things instead. The ceiling is whatever plates you own, so you are never capped by a 90kg stack, and the machine itself costs far less to build. The price is time and hassle: every resistance change means sliding plates on and off a bar, and supersetting between a heavy row and light flyes turns into a plate-shuffling session.

For most home lifters running a straightforward programme, that is a fair trade. If your training is full of drop sets and giant sets, it will drive you mad.

Do not misread the 300kg figure either. That is the frame rating; the weight bars themselves take up to 120kg of plates. Nobody is pulling 120kg on a lat pulldown at home, so this is not a practical limit for most people, but the two numbers describe different things and the listing does not make that obvious.

Space, assembly and the practical reality

Measure before you buy, and measure at the exact spot the cage will stand. Two hundred and twenty centimetres is fine under a typical 2.4m UK ceiling and awkward in a garage with an up-and-over door track, or anywhere with a sloped roof. You also want a metre or so of clear space to each side of the cage so the crossover cables have somewhere to go, which makes the real footprint closer to three and a half metres wide than the 165cm on the spec sheet.

Assembly is the usual story for a machine of this size: a long afternoon, a lot of bolts, and a second pair of hands for the top crossbar. Owners of similar frames consistently report that the instructions are the weak link. Lay every part out first, identify the bolts by length before you start, and do not fully tighten anything until the frame is square.

Floor protection is not optional here. Eighty-seven kilograms of steel plus your plates concentrated on four feet will dent a wooden floor and crack cheap tiles, so get gym flooring down first.

How it trains

The station list covers most of what a general strength programme needs. High pulley for lat pulldowns and triceps pushdowns, low pulley for rows, curls and cable pull-throughs, crossover position for cable flyes, and the landmine opens up presses, rotations and Meadows rows. With the J-hooks and barbell rack you can squat and bench inside the cage.

That last point deserves a caveat. A cage this price is fine for working sets but you should be conservative about training to absolute failure under a heavy bar without a spotter, and the safety provision is the part of any budget rack worth inspecting carefully on arrival. Squatting through a full range remains one of the better things you can do for your legs and knees when the load is sensible (scoping review on the deep squat and the knee joint).

One upside of a plate-loaded pulley worth mentioning: because there is no stack ceiling, you can run higher-rep, lighter cable work without feeling short-changed. For muscle growth specifically, load matters far less than most people assume once sets are taken close to failure, though heavier work still wins for maximal strength (low versus high load meta-analysis).

Value

Against a bare power cage at £250 with no pulleys, this is excellent value. Against a weight-stack crossover at £380 with no cage, it is a genuine alternative rather than a compromise. Against nothing at all, remember to add plates: £340 becomes £500 to £650 by the time you have a working setup, and that is the number to compare.

Two things keep it off a higher score. The six month warranty is short for a piece of steel furniture you expect to keep for a decade, and the listing is new enough that long-term reliability is unproven. If either of those bothers you, our best power cage guide and best cable machine guide cover the longer-established options.

Two strength sessions a week covering the major muscle groups is the NHS baseline (physical activity guidelines), and a frame like this removes every reason to skip them. You will also need weight plates and a bar before it does anything at all.

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